Las Vegas, March 12-13, 2008 – In order for us to adore movie stars, their faces need to be shown larger-than-life on screens, and so the studios make sure that ShoWest, the annual conference of theater owners, is a star-studded affair. 

The award ceremony is all about the future.  This year’s honorees – Sarah Jessica Parker, Anne Hathaway, Emile Hirsch, Robert Downey Jr. and Abigail Breslin – are all pushing upcoming products: Sex and the City, Get Smart, Speed Racer, Iron Man and Nim’s Island, respectively.   While Brendan Fraser received a “Distinguished Decade of Achievement in Film” award, he just happens to have a summer blockbuster, Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D, coming to theaters in July.  Isn’t that convenient?

Warner Bros. presented its slate of summer pics, including Speed Racer, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 and The Dark Knight, the Batman flick in which Heath Ledger appeared as The Joker.   America Ferrera, Matthew Fox, Christian Bale, Christina Ricci and Maggie Gyllenhaal were some of the celebs schmoozing theater operators at the Warner bash. 

Columbia Pictures premiered the upcoming gambling drama 21, with Kate Bosworth, James Sturgess and Kevin Spacey.  We ran into Aaron Yoo, who also stars in 21, a couple of months back, and he told us that skinny Bosworth actually loves fattening foods.  “Kate Bosworth, truth be told, lives on a diet of McDonald’s and Pizza Hut, with meatball subs thrown in every once in a while”, Yoo told us, and recounted an incident from the film shoot.  “Literally, one time she’s dragging me around a casino in Vegas going, ‘Sbarro’s.  I just want Sbarro’s pizza’.  And I was like, that’s just bread with grease on top of it!   And she’s just wolfing down two slices.”  Why doesn’t it show up on her hips, we wondered?  “It goes into the ghost person is where it goes,” Yoo figures.